Advice for Buyers

[3Six]

There's a degree of bogus with almost every listing. Those who aren't faking ownership are faking traffic or earnings and most of those who are not faking any of that won't admit how much of time the site actually takes to manage / run (i.e. deceit about input costs). Many don't see the difference between marketing their site and ...lying, and the number of things they can lie about is limited only by their ingenuity and imagination. Even if they are not lying at all they could be omitting to tell you that a major inward link is going to be pulled soon. Or that they are under threat of a lawsuit for the domain name infringing someone's trademark. Or that the merchant paying 90% of their earnings is planning on reducing his affiliate commission from 5% to 0.5%. Or a million other things. Buying a site isn't for the fainthearted. Or the risk averse.

In my day job I spread sweetness and light by recognising and rewarding the positive in everyone.

[Cosmos Unlimited]

There's a degree of bogus with almost every listing. Those who aren't faking ownership are faking traffic or earnings and most of those who are not faking any of that won't admit how much of time the site actually takes to manage / run (i.e. deceit about input costs). Many don't see the difference between marketing their site and ...lying, and the number of things they can lie about is limited only by their ingenuity and imagination. Even if they are not lying at all they could be omitting to tell you that a major inward link is going to be pulled soon. Or that they are under threat of a lawsuit for the domain name infringing someone's trademark. Or that the merchant paying 90% of their earnings is planning on reducing his affiliate commission from 5% to 0.5%. Or a million other things. Buying a site isn't for the fainthearted. Or the risk averse.

In my day job I spread sweetness and light by recognising and rewarding the positive in everyone.

Well, I guess to that degree, it's somewhat like the "real world." It just seems that the due dilligence process is more common/accepted in other businesses. I guess I will find out soon enough...

[3Six]

It just seems that the due dilligence process is more common/accepted in other businesses.

I've no idea what you mean - due diligence is done or performed, it's not "accepted (in businesses)". But good luck with buying sites.

[Cosmos Unlimited]

Here's a beauty.... I was interested in a buying a site. Found one today that especially interested my partners. One of them called the seller. Chatted for 15 minutes and agreed on the BIN listed on the site. Somewhere in the time it took for the seller to confirm the winning bid to us, someone else bid the BIN online. Any thoughts? Im thinking this couldnt be the first time someone agreed to a deal offline while someone else put in a BIN bid online... anyone have any thoughts? Any precedent in similar cases? Thanks!

[3Six]

Chatted for 15 minutes and agreed on the BIN listed on the site. Somewhere in the time it took for the seller to confirm the winning bid to us, someone else bid the BIN online.

That's life, get used to it It's now up to the seller to choose between his oral BIN bidder and the SP one. He needs to bear in mind that he agreed in the Sitepoint terms to sell to the BIN bidder here. But if he doesn't then there's very little anybody can do about it.

[axiom]

Hi All,

I'm wondering how I can verify that adsense statistics posted in a screenshot for a particular channel doesn't have adsense banners from other sites contributing to the revenue of that channel.

[3Six]

You could use screen sharing software (headups this page which has some other tips)

[andrews007]

I would gladly pay for someone far more experienced than me, a 'broker' that could ensure the seller was legitimate.
I would also gladly pay someone who was prepared to manage the site I purchased.

This is a valuable service and if there is no-one that specializes in website 'conveyancing' then I would be shocked. There would have to be thousands of people crying out for this service and it isn't exactly readily available

Any recommendations anyone??

[3Six]

Any broker worth his salt would have a contract with a list of exclusions as long as your arm. He won't take responsibility for anything going wrong in the whole process except if you can prove gross negligence (almost impossible to prove). You're better off doing your own due diligence. You could start here.

[waikoloavrm]

I have been interested in how purchasing sites for links works and if google really gives you credit. I would think that they would. If you took a site with a lot of incoming links and put relevant content on it I would think over time google would give you credit for those links thus increasing the value of the page. What do you think?

[FruitMedley Post]

Off topic: I thought some of you people buying sites might like to refresh your memory on how to transfer the site to your own server/hosting.

[FruitMedley Post]

With sites that claim to have a lot of traffic, make sure you know which countries the users come from.

There is a new trick now. Without giving away too much, it is now possible for sellers to fake the country of origin as well. Google Analytics gets fooled by this as easily as other stats programs.